In the Roman Empire, Spaniards such as the authors Seneca the Elder and the Younger, Lucan and Martial are thought of as part and parcel of Roman culture. Spanish Emperors such as Hadrian are thought of as being as thoroughly Roman as anyone else. The separation had not yet begun.
But then in the 5th century AD the sense began to spread that Spain was foreign, as the Vandals came in and ruled the whole peninsula. Germanic tribes ruled most of the rest of western Europe during the Dark Ages too, but what made the Vandals foreign to the rest was above all that they were Arian Christians, not Catholics -- not, that is, the sort of Christians who later, in historical hindsight, would become known as Catholics. In order to keep thinking of some group of people as foreign and horrible and wrong, it is best to know as little about them as possible, and so, while Western history of the Dark Ages conventionally mentions two writers above all, two Gregories, Gregory of Tours and Pope Gregory the Great, their late-6th-century-early-7th-century Spanish contemporary Isidore of Seville, even though he too was thoroughly Catholic and deeply involved in the Catholization of Spain, and even though he is a far, far more learned and interesting writer than either of the Gregories, is not nearly as well known in the West.
After the Vandals, the Muslims came to Spain and began a nearly 800-year-long epoch about which we in the West are just beginning to learn. So, for example, we are just now beginning to hear about Gerbert of Aurillac, even though he spent the last 4 years of his life, from 999 to 1003, as Pope Sylvester II, and even though he was indisputably one of the most brilliant European scholars of his age. We are just now beginning to hear about King Alfonso X of Castile, who reigned from 1252 to 1284, known all along to Spaniards as Alfonso el Sabio, Alfonso the Wise, who developed one of the centres of learning which welcome Christians, Jews and Muslims, which have been so intensely hated by some Christians and others since well before Alfonso's time right down to our own, and which always seem to be so brilliant.
Cultural tolerance leading directly to intellectual breakthroughs. Imagine such a thing.
Alfonso's court was one of those places where we got those translations of ancient Greek authors which had first been translated into Arabic -- translations we've heard a lot about, without usually asking where they came from. Another was the Sicilian court of Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor from 1220 to 1250. For his trouble, Frederick spent much of his reign excommunicated by various popes, and when he died Innocent IV offered a hymn of praise on the occasion of "the death of Antichrist." I'm not sure, but I bet that hymn makes no reference to the parable of the Good Samaritan from the Gospel of Luke, chapter 10, verses 25-37. I'm just guessing it doesn't.
Anyway: it wasn't just translations from Greek and Arabic into Latin which were produced at Alfonso's court: also, works originally written in Greek, Arabic or Latin were all translated into Castilian. And this may be one more, and a much more ironic reason for the cultural separation of Spain from the rest of western Europe. Alfonso's translations seems to have led to a decline of the use of Latin in Spain. The Latin language didn't disappear from Spain, but compared to academics and clerics in the rest of Western Europe, Spanish academics and clerics after Alfonso's time write surprisingly seldom in Latin. Latin remained the dominant language of academia in western Europe for a long, long time to come, still very lively in pockets of academia as late as the late 19th century. And this predominance of one common international language, quite naturally, fostered and nurtured one international academic community. Alfonso the Wise may have unintentionally, and unwisely, made Spain even more isolated from the rest of Europe than it already had been, because of these translations from Latin to Castilian.
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